Well said Paul. I find it to be a very intriguing question as to where AT&T is in all this mess. If i were Eric Grimmelmann, I would have been working real hard for real long on getting tom evslin, to get the AT&T CEO to cough up an obscene amount of money to be used to *BUY* BBN Planet. Anyone hear anything about them being in play or know where john curran is hanging out these days? The sad thing is that if AT&T does buy BBN and doesn't let the current BBN management team continue to do its own thing, I think we will see A flood of BBN talent leave BBN. ************************************************************************ The COOK Report on Internet For subsc. pricing & more than 431 Greenway Ave, Ewing, NJ 08618 USA ten megabytes of free material (609) 882-2572 (phone & fax) visit http://cookreport.com/ Internet: cook@cookreport.com On line speech of critics under attack by Ewing NJ School Board, go to http://cookreport.com/sboard.shtml ************************************************************************ On Sat, 3 May 1997, Paul A Vixie wrote:

Here's something with cobwebs on it that bears on the current UUNET discussion.

To: xxx Subject: text i removed from my recent message to nanog -- xxx Date: Fri, 10 May 1996 21:17:03 -0700 From: Paul A Vixie <vixie@wisdom.home.vix.com>

But what's interesting to me about this being your reason for not coming to CIX is that your policy is being shaped by other policies that you don't like. You have the option of configuring a CIX-connected router to avoid CIX for paths which have AS xxxx in them.

Ultimately the battle lines will be drawn, and there will be three distinct camps of folks (see below). In the mean while, the fact that the lines aren't clear is letting a lot of folks play "chicken" with each other's customers, and that's too bad.

When the battle lines form up, you'll see the peers, the peer-nots, and the lawyers/judges/politicians. My personal and oft-stated goal is to make the set of "peers" so large and so well interconnected that the "peer-nots" will get complaints from their own customers if they can't reach all the "peers".

Choosing not to join CIX, or any interconnect you can afford to join, for the reason you gave, works against the full connectivity of the "peers" in the above black-and-white picture, and this in turn will make it easier for the "peer-nots" to divide you all and conquer you, one at a time, since at no time will they feel enough pressure from their own customer bases.